This is Part 2 of our edited Q&A with Elijah Moses, founder of The People Who Care Project.
Elijah Moses, founder of The People Who Care Project, and the Wise Young Builders program. Photo: Courtesy of The People Who Care Project
Q: Tell me about your third program Wise Young Builders.
A: That’s my favorite program. For a while, we’ve been courting this concept of creating an eco-village. But all of these things that I want to teach adults to do – building four bedroom cottages – you don’t have to be homeless to do. Someone told me that it would be great to teach those kinds of carpentry skills to younger kids. The program started with teaching my son carpentry skills. I did a presentation for a group of moms about carpentry and their eyes lit up. I had the infrastructure in place, so we started this program. A group of eight moms sent me 15 kids. We started in August of 2010 and ran a year-long program, teaching kids how to use tools, read tape measures, and other math and carpentry skills.
[We’re] teaching kids at a young age how not to be vulnerable. One of our mottoes is: In order to have worth you must have a skill. In order to have a skill you must master something. In order to master something, you must be dedicated to a process.
You take an eight or ten-year old kid…if he’s growing up in the projects, there’s a really strong chance that he’s headed down a very narrow path. You start introducing him to skills and developers who look like him, a team that has tools and assembles projects…[it] gives him a sense of worth, while teaching him a skill.
We see this program as one that can grow some of our other programming.
Q: How so?
A: What I want to do with the adult program…it’s almost like, we should start smaller. [I realized] it would be easier to create a summer camp to teach young men math and work with them during out-of-school time and use that as a template to create an eco-village. If we have space to build the summer camp, the kids would come there during the summer and over the process of time, we could build our village up and begin the process of reaching out to the homeless.
Q: When you tell others your goal is to build an eco-village for the poor to come and build a cottage for themselves, do they look at you like you’re crazy?
A: I refer to it as people who live in the Matrix…if you say you’re going to do something that deviates from the standard, people may say “We shouldn’t do anything on that scale. What about their mental illness or what about this or that…”
I can’t reform America. But I can create a place where people can come and participate. In most homeless shelters, you don’t have to do anything to stay there. You don’t have to clean or cook…it enables people. I come from the school of thought that says you have to participate in your own salvation.
Q: Are there specific goals that you have for the next few years?
A: We are looking to strengthen the Wise Young Builders program by finding space and obtaining grants. We also want to tie Love’s Kitchen into our larger program by being able to invite people to a place where they can produce the food and then send it back to the soup kitchen to cook. This would lower our costs by getting people who are benefactors of the soup kitchen to become involved in creating the supply of food to meet the demand.
Q: What do you hope the greatest impact of The People Who Care Project is?
A: To put a dent in the way people perceive how to provide the solution; if other people can try it, it can be a template and praxis to eliminating homelessness. Let’s create a space to provide people the option never to be homeless again.
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The People Who Care Project is now restructuring its website, but you can still visit online for contact information or visit the Wise Young Builders program. You can also follow them on Facebook.
Read Part 1 of our Q&A with Elijah Moses.
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Posted on December 20, 2011
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